Now these are characteristics which are by no means uncommonly found in persons and in times friendly to criticism. And the love of Aristides for literature (at least for the rhetorical side of it) is not only outspoken, but to all appearance unfeigned. His devotion is not merely valetudinarian, but voluntary. If there is a rhetorical extravagance in the phrase, there is a more than rhetorical sincerity in the sentiment of his declarations that, while others may find love or bathing or drinking or hunting sweet, speeches[155] are his sole delight: they absorb all his friendship and all his faculties; they are to him as parents and children, as business and pastime. It is about them that he invokes Aphrodite: he plays with them and works with them, rejoices in them, embraces them, knocks only at their doors. Elsewhere, “the whole gain and sum of life to man is oratorical occupation”; and elsewhere again, “I would rather have the gift of speech, with a modest and honourable life as man best may, than be Darius the son of Hystaspes two thousand times over: and everything seems to me little in comparison with this.” Footnote 155: The excellent Canterus, who has strung these passages in his Prolegomena (iii. 779), would fain translate οἱ λόγοι “literature”; but it is pretty certain from the context that Aristides was thinking of rhetorical literature only. This is something like a “declaration.” Nor, on merely running down the list of the fairly voluminous extant works of Aristides (especially when the inner meanings, which do not always appear in the titles, are grasped), do matters look unpromising. The majority of the pieces are indeed pure epideictic—discourses to or about the gods, a mighty “Panathenaic” (the _chef d'œuvre_, with only one rival, of the author)—panegyrics of Smyrna, Rome, and other places, “Leuctrics” (_i.e._, debating-society speeches, on the side of the Lacedæmonians, on the side of the Thebans, and neutral), arguments for and against sending assistance to the Athenian expedition at Syracuse, all the stock—a stock surprise to us—of this curious declamation-commonplace. But there are four pieces (between them making up the stuff of a good-sized volume) in which, from such a man, literary criticism might seem to be inevitable. They are the περὶ τοῦ μὴ δεῖν κωμῳδεῖν[156] (a discourse whether comedy shall be permitted or not), the long Defence of Rhetoric (περὶ ῥητορικῆς)[157] against Plato’s attacks, especially in the _Gorgias_, the very much longer and oddly named ὑπὲρ τῶν τεττάρων,[158] an apology for Miltiades, Themistocles, Pericles, and Cimon, which completes this, and the still more oddly named περὶ τοῦ παραφθέγματος[159] (“Concerning my blunder”), which meets, with not a little tartness and wounded conceit, but with a great deal of ingenuity, the suggestion, through a third person, of some “d——d good-natured friend,”[160] that Aristides had committed a fault of